Redundancy vs. Revelation: The Structural Self-Sabotage of the 'Rashomon' Effect

by Narain Jashanmal on November 1, 2025

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1. Introduction: The Hollow Promise of a Complex Structure

The viewer reaction to Netflix's A House of Dynamite (2025) tells a story in three acts: "part 1: wow this is great! part 2: oh we're doing this again? part 3:.....". This trajectory from engagement to repetition to apathy is a precise diagnosis of a film that sabotages its own high-stakes premise by misusing a complex narrative device.

This device, the multi-perspective narrative universally known as the 'Rashomon structure,' is a high-risk formalist tool that backfires spectacularly when its form is mistaken for its function—a trap that ensnared both A House of Dynamite and The Last Duel. They replicate the surface-level technique of Akira Kurosawa's 1950 masterpiece while completely ignoring its moral-philosophical inquiry into human ego and deception.

This structural self-sabotage occurs because filmmakers mistakenly believe the device itself will impute a "complexity and depth" onto a story that has not earned it. Instead, as the critique of A House of Dynamite notes, when a script is "brittle," the relentless repetition only lays its weaknesses bare. The core principle is simple: the structure must not just contain the theme; the structure must be the theme.

2. Case Study in Failure Part I: A House of Dynamite and the Diffusion of Tension

The Promise of a Ticking Clock

On paper, A House of Dynamite was poised for success. Marking the return of director Kathryn Bigelow, it deployed her signature "procedural precision" to a gut-wrenching political thriller premise: an unidentified ICBM is 18 minutes from impacting Chicago. The verisimilitude of its depiction of nuclear command-and-control chaos was so effective, it reportedly prompted a real-world internal memo from the Pentagon intended to "address false assumptions" and "provide correct facts" to staff unnerved by the film's scenario. Technically and atmospherically, the film excels, creating a chillingly plausible scenario that establishes a powerful linear momentum in its first act.

The Failure of the 'Nuclear Rashomon'

The film's central flaw is its "bold structure," which replays the 18-minute window from three different perspectives. This "nuclear Rashomon" is where the meticulously built tension fractures. The failure can be broken down into two critical points:

Redundancy Without Revelation: The essential details of the crisis remain unaltered in each segment. The subsequent perspectives are merely additive, offering new angles on the same set of facts, but they are not transformative. The audience learns nothing new of substance, and repetition serves only to frustrate.

Tension Diffusion: There is a fundamental incompatibility between the film's genre and its chosen structure. A ticking-clock thriller requires linear, compounding suspense to maintain its narrative power. A Rashomon structure is inherently non-linear and repetitive. As one critic observed, the film "loses momentum when it changes POVs." Instead of building suspense, the structure resets the clock, sacrificing visceral thrills for a hollow structural gimmick.

The 'So What?' Ending

This structural failure leads directly to audience apathy. The characters are criticized as "thinly" written tropes with no clear hero for the audience to invest in. The repetitive structure actively prevents meaningful character development by focusing on replaying an event rather than exploring the people within it.

This lack of emotional investment renders the film's conclusion inert. The "deliberate cliffhanger" ending, intended as a "call to action" to spark a conversation on nuclear policy, was met with an "audible groan" in theaters. It was widely seen not as a thought-provoking conclusion but as a "cop-out" that antagonizes the viewer. Having been given no emotional reason to care, the audience's response to the film's intellectual "what if" scenario was the only logical one: "so what?"

3. Case Study in Failure Part II: The Last Duel and a Contradictory Moral Imperative

The critical consensus on Ridley Scott's The Last Duel was that it was "gloomily repetitive," with a multi-perspective device that was ultimately "100% unnecessary." The film forces the audience to sit through the same events multiple times, alienating them with a structure that feels pointless.

The core of this failure is a fatal internal contradiction. Kurosawa's original Rashomon is a philosophical meditation on the impossibility of ever fully knowing objective truth. The Last Duel, by contrast, is a post-#MeToo film operating under a "moral imperative" that requires an unambiguous, objective truth. It isn't about the elusiveness of truth, but about the societal necessity of believing a specific truth.

This contradiction is made explicit when the film introduces its final segment with the on-screen title card: "The truth." This single decision negates the entire purpose of the preceding structure. It renders the first two-thirds of the film not just unreliable but known falsehoods. The experience devolves from a complex exploration of perception into a "lecture." The film is robbed of genuine complexity because the differences between the perspectives are, as critics noted, "largely cosmetic." Even in Le Gris's self-serving "truth," the act is still clearly a violent assault. The structure thus wastes the audience's time on perspectives it has already invalidated, simply to "drive home the point... that the men... are... self-deluded assholes." Its structure, which promises ambiguity, is in a fatal, contradictory fight with its theme, which demands certainty.

4. Deconstructing the Masterpiece: The Misunderstood Genius of Kurosawa

The Myth of the Rashomon Effect

The common criticism that modern imitators "are not Kurosawa" is precise. Kurosawa's 1950 film was a cinematic "thunderbolt" that introduced the "Rashomon effect" into the global lexicon, a term now used in law, psychology, and journalism to describe contradictory interpretations of the same event.

However, the popular understanding of this effect is a myth. The "Rashomon effect" is commonly understood as being about the subjectivity of truth and the fallibility of memory—the idea that objective reality is impossible to grasp because human perception is inherently flawed.

This misinterpretation leads to failed imitations. Kurosawa’s actual thesis was not epistemological but moralistic. He stated it himself: "Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves... They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing". The film's theme is not flawed memory; it is a film about conscious deception, driven by the human compulsion to lie to protect one's ego and vanity. The characters present accounts distorted in ways that flatter themselves. This is the crucial distinction that modern imitators miss: The Last Duel is about men who are self-deluded, whereas Rashomon is about characters who consciously lie to themselves and others to maintain their self-image.

Style as Substance

Kurosawa’s success was not the idea of the structure, but its flawless execution. The film’s "bravura design" was entirely motivated by its theme. His revolutionary cinematography—including shooting directly into the sun—and exaggerated acting style were not empty flourishes. This radical form was the only way to express the film's radical and despairing theme about the illusions of the ego.

5. Beyond Imitation: How Successful Modern Films Evolve the Device

The Rashomon structure is not inherently flawed; it simply punishes lazy imitation. It can succeed, but only when it evolves Kurosawa’s principle to serve a new, equally motivated purpose.

Success Case: Gone Girl and the 'Formal Twist'

David Fincher's Gone Girl succeeds by weaponizing the unreliable narrator. Its genius is purely cinematic. The film visually depicts Amy Dunne’s fabricated diary entries as objective flashback "truth." The famous "midpoint" reveal is a formal twist, not just a plot twist; it exposes that the images we saw were whole-cloth fabrications. The effect is 'extremely jarring and powerful' precisely because it weaponizes the audience's trust, implicating the very medium of film in its deception.

Success Case: Hero and the 'Philosophical Twist'

Zhang Yimou’s Hero uses its structure not to obscure truth, but as a strategic "chess game" between an assassin and a king. The unreliability of the narratives is a given from the start. Zhang brilliantly uses color-coding to signify each perspective, making the competing accounts clear. But the film transcends a simple search for facts. Where Rashomon asks "What is truth?," Hero asks, "Is truth more important than a greater ideal?" The structure is the vehicle for this profound political-philosophical debate, not an end in itself.

6. Conclusion: The Cardinal Sin is Redundancy Without Revelation

The Rashomon structure is a narrative amplifier: it makes a good script great and a weak script unbearable. The films that fail to use it effectively commit the same cardinal sin.

The cardinal sin is redundancy without revelation. When repetition offers no new meaning, only new camera angles on the same facts, the structure becomes a hollow "gimmick."

The most cautionary tale is Vantage Point (2008), a film universally panned for being "maddeningly repetitive." It failed because its structure had nothing to do with Kurosawa’s thematic project. Kurosawa used repetition to complicate the truth; Vantage Point merely added plot coupons. It was a complicated puzzle, but not a complex film.

The modern failures can be summarized succinctly:

• A House of Dynamite fails because it has no revelation at all.
• The Last Duel fails because its revelation is morally predetermined.
• Vantage Point fails because its revelations are only plot-deep.

Filmmakers chase the bravura style of Kurosawa but ignore the cause that motivated it. They forget the foundational principle that he understood perfectly.

The structure is the substance, or it is nothing at all.